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TRIBUTE† IN MEMORY OF LOUIS A. DEL COTTO, 1923–2005 † This Tribute would not have been possible without the efforts of the following members of the Buffalo Law Review—Sachin Kohli, Editor-in-Chief, 2005-2006, Dennis Wiley, Executive Publication Editor, 2005-2006, Michael D. Mann, Managing Editor, 2005-2006, and Rachael M. MacVean and Jeffrey A. Davis, Executive Publication Editors, 2006-2007. 377 Copyright © 2007 by Buffalo Law Review Remembering Louis Del Cotto DIANNE BENNETT† He was a tall man, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, tie, angular features, deep-set Italian eyes, piercing into our fear. No doubt we, the seemingly experienced law school sophomores in the Class of 1975, might even have visibly quaked. At least we all remember being afraid of Tax A, as the introductory required tax course at SUNY at Buffalo Law School then was called. And we feared it even more, because we were taking the course from the person reputed to be the most challenging of professors, Lou Del Cotto. What we soon learned was that Lou Del Cotto was the consummate teacher. One might be able to measure Lou’s success as a tax teacher statistically. It seems to us who went on to practice tax law that the number of tax practitioners produced by Lou, and Lou and Ken Joyce1 together, is extraordinarily high. We never intended to be tax lawyers, say most of us who are tax practitioners today; it was all Lou’s doing. But we do not have those statistics, so the anecdotal evidence must suffice. Partly because of Lou’s uniqueness, I knew when I was asked to write a piece about Lou in this tribute issue of the Buffalo Law Review, I could not do it alone. The Class of ’75 seemed to me an unusual class, and I called on three of my † Dianne Bennett was a partner, including managing partner for a term, for thirty years at the Buffalo-headquartered law firm, Hodgson Russ LLP. She served on the tax policy staffs of both the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Treasury Department in the late 1970s, the latter position under Donald C. Lubick, the author of another tribute article to Lou Del Cotto in this volume. Ms. Bennett has been elected to the American Law Institute, American College of Tax Counsel, and American College of Employee Benefit Counsel, among other recognitions of her career in tax law. She describes herself now as “mostly” retired, while she continues to be active in law and community service, primarily in Buffalo, New York. 1. Ken Joyce—who also has written a tribute piece in this issue—was mentored by Lou, and became one of University at Buffalo Law School’s most honored teachers himself. 379 Copyright © 2007 by Buffalo Law Review 380 BUFFALO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 55 fellow classmates—all tax lawyers more than thirty years later—to help figure out just what made Lou, and perhaps our class’s relationship to him, unusual. In the 1970s, Tax A was a required course, normally taken in the second year. We were sophomores when the Class of 1975 ventured onto SUNY at Buffalo’s North Campus, becoming in 1973 the first students to take classes in the first—and only— building on that campus (for me, driving in from Fredonia, it seemed more like Siberia than Buffalo). We were the last of the small law classes, numbering fewer than 170. So, with eighty-plus of us to a tax section, we sat on the carpeted tiers of one of the new, and as yet unfurnished, O’Brian Hall classrooms, at best wary of Tax A. Wary, because Tax A was rumored to be difficult, and getting assigned to Professor Del Cotto’s class seemed to be drawing the short straw. That’s the recollection of four of us who were there: with me, Richard F. Campbell, my partner in the Tax Department at Hodgson Russ LLP in Buffalo for over thirty years; Barbara D. Klippert, now a partner at the preeminent tax law firm in New York City, McKee Nelson LLP; and Timothy Cotter, who remains at the Internal Revenue Service Chief Counsel’s Office in Buffalo after his more than thirty-year career with the IRS in Washington, D.C. and Buffalo. Even with us students of the 1970s, with our jeans and long hair and long jewelry to match, sprawled on the colored carpets, Lou kept his formality. The generation gap was heightened by the times and intensified by Lou’s personality. He not only looked formal and imposing, he addressed us by our last names (“Mr. Campbell,” “Mr. Cotter,” “Mrs. Barth” (Barbara had another last name), “Mrs. Graebner” (so did I)), and I am sure we shook when he called on us. As Klippert now recalls, “I was scared to death of taking tax.”2 Lou emanated earnestness, seriousness. He leaned his tall frame forward from the bottom of that pitched, large classroom, and honed in on the student who was the focus of his modified (even if it did not seem so at the time) Socratic method. “If you didn’t learn, he took it personally,” is the way Campbell describes it; Lou certainly made you feel that. Klippert contrasts his teaching style to those teachers she had then and since who 2. Cheryl D. Block, a professor of tax for more than twenty years, describes some of this same fear in her tribute piece in this issue. Copyright © 2007 by Buffalo Law Review 2007] TRIBUTE TO LOUIS DEL COTTO 381 don’t seem to care if the class is over your head. Surely, you knew, Lou cared. “He demanded no more of his students than of himself,” says Cotter. Of course, that is saying a lot. Cotter remembers Lou telling him long after our days in his tax classes that he would tear up his notes after the end of each year and start over again the next year, because, Lou told Cotter, he learned more from the students each year and wanted to reflect that experience. “Imagine,” says Cotter, “that from a guy who had it all in his head.” This story may be apocryphal, and Ken Joyce may know the truth, but I preferred not to check it. Even if apocryphal, the story illuminates Lou. Klippert also recalls some of us talking to Lou outside of class one day. Lou, according to Klippert, said that—as much as we were scared of him—he was scared of us. “Don’t you remember that?” she asked me, “That was amazing to me.” Now that I reflect on this, his own anxiety must have been part of what made his teaching great. Each class was a challenge to him, a challenge to communicate to us, his students, and an opportunity for him to learn from us, but learn in a manner that was not at all comfortable, it appears. Inside all that earnestness (and apparently anxiety) clearly was passion. As Cotter puts it: “passion combined with effort.” Lou did not make what he did seem easy. What these stories illustrate is the ways in which Lou “struggled with us,” to use Klippert’s language. “We were always working with him in figuring out those concepts,” she said. With Lou, the students were working together with him to solve tax problems. And that may be a hallmark of a great teacher: one who makes you feel you and he are in the game together. Dick Campbell and I recall taking Tax A because we were required to do so; Tax B, because we liked Tax A; Tax C (Corporate Tax) because we liked Tax B; and Tax D (Corporate Reorganizations), because we liked Tax C. Almost twenty students, a record number as I recall, ended up in that fourth tax course from our small Class of ’75. As the luck of the draw had it, we had all those courses with Professor Del Cotto.3 3. I sometimes joked with Ken Joyce that he was the best tax teacher I never had for tax. Copyright © 2007 by Buffalo Law Review 382 BUFFALO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 55 Given that the four of us, along with dozens of others, became tax lawyers, there had to be more to Lou’s teaching than his passion. He had to convince us of his regard for, and the worthiness of, the subject. I know that tax sometimes is considered on a lower rung of the law school curriculum. Some would say it is technical, it is black letter law, it is not conceptual, it is not socially relevant. Perhaps Lou’s greatest lesson to us was putting the lie to this trivialization of tax law. Lou taught us to regard tax law as a high form of the social-compact in at least three ways: he taught us to look for what is right, to understand the basic concepts in ways few can imagine, and to appreciate beautiful writing. In our years at Hodgson Russ, Dick Campbell and I, who both like to say we are joined at the hip, often would bat around ways of solving problems for clients, and always would say, “Well, this is the right answer; now what does the Code say?” Lou taught us that, and Don Lubick4 never let us forget it. As students, before we even looked at what the law was, recalls Campbell, Lou made us look for the right answer (without hammering us over the head with what later would be called political correctness). There are too many rules in tax law to learn them, as Campbell notes; you cannot just learn the rules and be a good tax lawyer.

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